Cookie notice

Cookie notice: see how the cookie crumbles

Whoever thought the humble cookie would need a whole notice to itself! We’ve all got our favourites (chocolate chip anyone?), but they’re not the type featured here. This notice talks about the cookies and similar tracking technologies that we use across the websites we operate and all the services we provide to you.

Last updated: 17 June 2019

What cookies/tracking technologies do we use?

A cookie is a small text file that’s placed on your computer or mobile device when you visit one of our websites. We, and some of our affiliates and third-party service providers, may use a few different types of cookies. Some are persistent cookies (cookies that remain on your hard drive for an extended period of time) and some are session ID cookies (cookies that expire when you close your browser).

We also use other tracking technologies like web beacons (sometimes called “tracking beacons” or “clear gifs”) and local storage. These are tiny graphics files that contain a unique identifier that enable us to recognise when someone has visited our websites or opened an email that we have sent them.

Why do we use cookies/tracking technologies?

Even though they’re not as exciting as the round, sugary and delicious variety, these types of cookies and tracking technologies are still important. They help us to do awesome things like operate our websites and services, enhance and customise your experience across our websites and services, perform analytics and deliver advertising and marketing that’s relevant to you.

There are also cookies set by third parties across our websites and services. Third party cookies enable third party features or functionality to be provided on or through our websites and services, such as advertising, interactive content and analytics. They also enable us to use advertising networks to manage our advertising on other websites.

Xero cookies

Below is a list of cookies that we use on our websites and services. The types of cookies we use are always changing. Check back regularly to make sure you stay up to date. If you think we’ve missed a cookie, please let us know.

XeroLocation (Essential)
This stores your current or preferred regional version of xero.com.

XeroPromoCode (Essential)
This stores an optional promotional code inline with campaign offers that can later be applied if you become a paying customer.

aam_xero (Customisation)
This stores a list of segment id we believe describes you as a customer so that we can personalise your experience.

XeroXtid (Analytics)
This is used to enable us to confirm conversion rates on sign-up to help us continually improve the service that we provide to our customers.

XRO_gclid, XRO_dclid (Analytics)
These are used to enable us to confirm conversion rates on sign-up to help us continually improve the service that we provide to our customers.

XeroCommissionJunction, XeroImpactRadius (Analytics)
These are used to enable us to confirm conversion rates on sign-up from our affiliate marketing activities.

__distillery (Customisation)
This cookie is used in context with the video-player, so that if you are interrupted while viewing video content, the cookie remembers where to start the video if you reload it.

sm_Token (Essential)
This cookie determines if you are logged in.

__ab12#
Pending - to be confirmed

__hssrc (Customisation)
Collects anonymous statistical data related to the user's website visits, such as the number of visits, average time spent on the website and what pages have been loaded. The purpose is to segment the website's users, in order to enable media and marketing agencies to structure and understand their target groups to enable customised online advertising.

Hubspotutk (Customisation)
Keeps track of your identity. This cookie is passed to the marketing platform HubSpot on form submission and used when de-duplicating contacts.

Akamai (Functionality)We use Akamai as a global content delivery network to enhance your experience (e.g., by speeding up load times).

Salesforce Live Agent (Functionality)
We use Salesforce Live Agent to enable us to live chat with you with on xero.com.

Marketo (Analytics and functionality)
We use Marketo as a marketing automation platform so we can personalise your experience with us.

Adobe Target (Customisation)
We use Adobe Target as an A/B platform so we can test the effectiveness of different experiences.

Facebook (Analytics)We use Facebook as a medium to talk to customers and to measure effectiveness of campaigns.

LinkedIn(Analytics)
We use LinkedIn as a medium to talk to customers and to measure effectiveness of campaigns.

Twitter (Analytics)
We use Twitter as a medium to talk to customers and to measure effectiveness of campaigns.

DoubleClick (Analytics)
We use DoubleClick to help manage our digital marketing activities.

Hotjar (Analytics)
We use hotjar to measure and understand the user experience.

Outbrain (Analytics)
We use Outbrain as a medium to help reach new users and measure effectiveness of such campaigns.

Floodlight (Analytics)
We use Floodlight to help measure effectiveness of campaigns.

WorkflowMax Third Party Cookies (in addition to Xero Third Party Cookies above)

Cloudflare (Functionality)
We use Cloudflare as a global content delivery network (CDN) to enhance your experience (e.g., by speeding up load times).

Scorecard Research (Analytics)
We use ScorecardResearch to participate in anonymous research about which other websites our visitors go to.

SlideShare (Advertising)
We use LinkedIn and SlideShare integrations to embed content from LinkedIn or Slideshare or allow you to share our content on LinkedIn or Slideshare. LinkedIn or Slideshare may use this cookie to customise advertising for you.

Reddit (Advertising)
We use Reddit integrations to embed content from Reddit or allow you to share our content on Reddit. Reddit may use this cookie to customise advertising for you.

Sumologic (Analytics)
We use Sumo Logic to collect website data for security, operations and business intelligence.

Typekit (Functionality)
This is used to authenticate our website with Adobe Typekit to ensure we are a recognised licence holder when using certain premium fonts.

VisualWebsiteOptimizer (Analytics)
We use Visual Website Optimiser to test content changes across a percentage of our visitors and to understand how different versions of content on our site perform.

Wistia (Analytics)
We use Wistia to host videos on our site. Wistia uses cookies to collect information relating to how particular users interact with our videos. This data may be used to communicate with you.

The types of cookies we use are always changing. Check back regularly to make sure you stay up to date.

Instafile Third Party Cookies (in addition to Xero Third Party Cookies above)

Vimeo (vuid) (Analytics)
These cookies are used by Vimeo to collect video analytics tracking information.

Google (NID)Most Google users will have a preferences cookie called ‘NID’ in their browsers. A browser sends this cookie with requests to Google’s sites. The NID cookie contains a unique ID Google uses to remember your preferences and other information, such as your preferred language (e.g. English), how many search results you wish to have shown per page (e.g. 10 or 20), and whether or not you wish to have Google’s SafeSearch filter turned on.

Google Analytics (_ga, _gid, _gat) (Analytics)For Google Analystics.

How can you control cookies?

You can accept or reject cookies by amending your web browser controls. Because they’re important, our websites and services might not work like they’re supposed to, and in some cases, might not work at all, if you decide to reject our cookies.